Gatz, an extraordinary staging of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel – which features
every word of the book and lasts as long as a transatlantic flight – is
coming to Britain. Dominic Cavendish reports.

It begins with an ordinary guy entering a shabby office for the day. He tries and fails to switch on his antiquated-looking computer – and then becomes engrossed in the paperback novel he finds in a large Rolodex on the desk.

He reads the book out-loud. As his colleagues arrive, they appear oblivious to his speech, albeit bemused by his absorption. Almost eight hours later, we’re still watching this man in his down-at-heel workplace and yet we are also entirely elsewhere – in Long Island and New York of the Twenties, among the rich and successful, the haunted and the heartbroken. In reading the book chapter by chapter, this nondescript male has morphed into its narrator Nick Carraway and in gradually chipping in, drawn into the world he describes, as if possessed, the dozen figures around him have become the other characters in one of American fiction’s undisputed classics, The Great Gatsby.

So runs GATZ – the exhaustive, clever, funny, touching account of F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece as performed by New York’s Elevator Repair Service. Conceived in 1999 and up-and-running since 2005, the show has wowed the company’s home-city several times, been seen across the United States and overseas and will come to the West End in June as part of the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT).

Featuring all 49,000 words of the book and requiring the audience to sit for almost the duration of a transatlantic flight, GATZ may sound like the epitome of “heavy-going”, yet there’s so much canny invention by the company, and just enough in the way of breaks, that, I kid you not, the time flies. What you end up with is both hyper-reverent and super-experimental: a meticulous tribute to Fitzgerald’s novel and a homage to the power of theatre.

That it should all have gone so swimmingly continues to delight its director John Collins, who began the enterprise in the spirit of pure experimentation. “We started off messing around with the novel because I’d fallen in love with it but I couldn’t find a way to cut it,” he says. “Then it hit me: ‘This is a book, let’s stop trying to make it a play – why not do the whole thing?’. I thought we would fail but that it would be an interesting, productive failure. I didn’t think that what would happen would be that it would actually work.”

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The framing device only came about once they picked up the project in earnest in 2004, partly inspired by the drab rehearsal space they were using. That approach nudged many things into place but the more progress they made, the more remote seemed the possibility of acquiring the stage rights. The Fitzgerald estate was sceptical and was backing another, bigger, would-be Broadway contender. Three days before Elevator Repair Service was due to open, Collins recalls with a shudder, the estate said “‘No, definitely not – drop it’. We had the whole thing ready to go.”

Braving the prospect of writs and fines, they ploughed on in an underground fashion, advertising the production as an open-rehearsal. As excited word got out that the show was very good indeed, the estate slowly began to relent on touring rights – but it wasn’t until 2010 that they were officially allowed to play New York.

By this point, Scott Shepherd who, as Nick, carries the evening – or rather long day’s journey into night – was a lot older than the narrator’s 30 years; he’s 43 now. But as he points out, backstage at Manhattan’s Public Theatre, where he and the company are gathering ahead of another marathon session, the more wrinkles the better, in a way. “The joke is that I’ll be 70 years old and still doing this damn show,” he says. “I’ll be like Mick Jagger. The point is that the differences embody the longing at the heart of the book.” It’s fine, he reckons, that Jordan (Nick’s girlfriend) doesn’t have the right colour hair or that balding Jim Fletcher gives us a millionaire bachelor-hero who more resembles Frasier than Leonardo DiCaprio, who’s playing Gatsby in Baz Luhrmann’s forthcoming film.

‘Our show is built on inaccuracy,” says Shepherd. “It’s built on the contradiction between the setting we create and the setting described in the book. The audience’s imagination operates in the space between the two. And encoded in that is the longing that is at the base of the story – you’ve got these schlubs in a crummy office wanting to evoke the glamorous story of The Great Gatsby or even these schlubs in a rundown theatre company trying to do Gatsby when they don’t have the resources to put on the moneyed production.”

Having performed it well over a hundred times, the book is so imprinted on his memory he could probably recite it through unaided, if required. He has only “dried” once – his mouth was so parched he couldn’t speak, and even then he got through somehow. Otherwise his powers of endurance would shame the fittest Olympian.

How does he keep fresh? He treats it like a day at the office, he tells me. “Some people would do a big warm-up and reset their whole system but when I come onto the stage, I try not to construct a wall like that – it makes sense to go onstage and not know what is going to happen.”

Collins marvels at the way familiarity has failed to breed complacency. “I worry about everyone getting tired of it, the actors losing interest, or the show becoming rote somehow. Yet I keep seeing new waves of excitement.”

And that excitement is infectious. Why is the show such a hit? “Some of what’s going on is the simple buzz you get in witnessing the rediscovery of something that has almost become a cliché. The Great Gatsby is so much a part of everyone’s consciousness and even so much a part of the language that it’s taken for granted. I think there’s a huge pleasure that comes from suddenly seeing it anew.”

GATZ runs at the Noel Coward Theatre, London WC2 (0844 482 5140), from June 8-July 15 as part of LIFT. Info: liftfestival.com